From the mid-1990s to onset of Covid at the end of 2019, China almost singlehandedly drove the commodities supercycle, consisting of ever-increasing prices for the key materials it required to drive its extraordinary economic growth. As the virus took hold across the country, accompanied by its Draconian ‘zero-Covid’ policy that saw entire cities closed at the merest hint of the illness, its economic growth rate plummeted. Last year, it managed to hit its official economic growth target of ‘around 5 percent’, finally posting…
